All the news that fits our Trotskyist Toff viewpoint:
Michelle Malkin’s Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies has been top of the NY Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller for four weeks but the rag has still not published a review.
Haven’t a clue whether there’s substance in the author’s claims, but you’d expect the NYT would at least acknowledge them. Or have the tired old lady’s ideals drifted so far from the marketplace that it doesn’t believe a significant section of the population’s major purchase of choice is noteworthy?

If you’re going to have a last word about Ted Kennedy, why not let Mark Steyn loose with the blowtorch?

As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo’s – but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not?

Teddy’s politics and positions have largely been an affront to those who lust for liberty. The media made great hay today of his support for 1960’s era civil rights legislation, though any decent human being would have as well. No, all Ted’s other legislation was designed to rob the average American of his wealth (Teddy’s money is sheltered in offshore trusts) restrict rights (Teddy was a slave to the gun control industry) and limit free choice in many fields (like where to purchase one’s health insurance).

As you’d regrettably expect, some mainstream press in Australia chose to gush rather than give a factual appraisal.
The Age sank deeper in the mire than usual by referring to his abandonment of a dying young woman as “a lapse of judgment”!!!
Imagine: “Yes, your honour, I cut her throat and hacked her into pieces. Call it a lapse of judgment”.
Nine network news tonight was just plain amateurish by not even mentioning Mary Jo Kopechne or Kennedy’s disgraceful conduct.
Are budget cuts so savage at Bendigo St that the makeup girl is writing the bulletins?
Kerry Packer must be spinning in his grave. If he’s not organising a fireside welcome for Kennedy.

UPDATE:
The Kennedys have often been described as US royalty. Ted must have believed his court was cobbled from the worst excesses of the roman empire, Henry VIII and the Sun King. It is almost amusing to watch lefties wailing and gushing at the passing of such a vile exploiter of privilege. Rush Limbaugh recalls a piece on Kennedy by the late acclaimed editor of New Republic, Michael Kelly:

It was a long article, and it was incredible . . . But it detailed every reprobate act the guy was known for. Interviews with waitresses who had been slammed on tables when walking in the room and so forth. People have been paid off for their silence. The waitress sandwich was described in great detail. The waitress sandwich is this. Chris Dodd and Kennedy were drinking buddies and this piece detailed Kennedy in the first 15 minutes of arriving someplace downed three screwdrivers, and then they’d send the waitresses in there and he’d grab one there on on the table breaking the plates and the glass and so forth. I mean, that’s just minor stuff. I’m just giving you the stuff on the family show here that we can discuss. The waitress sandwich is this. Either Dodd… It’s on the floor, either Dodd or Kennedy on the floor then the waitress on top of either Dodd or Kennedy and then either Dodd or Kennedy on top of the waitress!

No doubt some acolyte in the media will remind us in coming days of Kennedy’s wimpish, or playful, or gentle humour.
Humour like this?

Jules Crittenden mentioned on his blog he heard Ed Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, recalling on air that Ted Kennedy liked to joke about Chappaquiddick. It seemed to defy belief, so I listened to the episode of The Diane Rehm Show in question and sure enough — I’ve transcribed what Klein told guest host Katy Kay.

I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?”

Makes you want to go and wash your hands, doesn’t it?
That roaring silence? Er, that would be the duchesses of the feminist movement.

I suppose the loopy left could excuse their dodgy health system by suggesting it helps redistribute wealth:Compensation payments to NHS patients have risen by 20 per cent in the past year to a record high of £769million. At this rate more than £2million a day is being paid over claims against the Health Service.

Reckon Americans opposed to Obama’s plan to introduce the same economy-wrecking, fault-ridden system there will soak up these reports with glee.

UPDATE:
The system’s health continues to deteriorate:In the last six years, the Patients Association claims hundreds of thousands have suffered from poor standards of nursing, often with ‘neglectful, demeaning, painful and sometimes downright cruel’ treatment.

The brilliant Bill Whittle explains the origins of political correctness and how this nihilistic tool of hypocrites has been passed down to underline the narrative of today’s Left and their useful idiots in the modern media.

We keep hearing that the economic downturn is not as bad as first thought and that unemployment has risen by less than 2pc. If jobs have been lost in any number, experts say, they are full-time jobs becoming part-time.
That’s not what a lot of business heads have been saying, particularly those operating in outer suburbs and regional cities.Here’s their proof:

Centrelink figures show an extra 22,000 people started receiving the Newstart allowance last month, almost 25 times the size of the increase in the official Australian Bureau of Statistics survey, which registered a rise in unemployment of only 900.
Since the global financial crisis struck last September, the official measure of unemployment has risen from 4.3 to 5.8 per cent, with the number of people looking for work rising by 36.1 per cent.
However, the Centrelink figures show a 50.6 per cent jump in the number of people receiving unemployment benefits.

Those figures don’t include the recently unemployed whose spouses are still drawing a wage.
The ABS figures, as many have suspected over the years, are only useful for making politicians look better.
With all the debt Rudd’s government is amassing, along with household expenditure hikes for useless carbon trading scams, those tax rises on the horizon look mighty threatening.

Union honchoes have been known to perform some pretty rotten acts over the decades, but United Firefighters Union national secretary Peter Marshall has plumbed new depths in despicability.
Marshall has used a heart-breaking tragedy as ammunition in his mob’s ongoing war with the Country Fire Authority.

THE mother and her four children killed in last Sunday’s Clifton Springs house fire had no chance of survival because of a shortage of firefighters, a union has claimed.
United Firefighters Union national secretary Peter Marshall said Ocean Grove firefighters arrived at the blaze far too late to rescue anyone inside.

Don’t expect apologies or remorse from Marshall who’s clearly an egotistical goose. But we can only hope his colleagues, friends and family are deeply ashamed. If his union’s members have any decency they’ll bounce him from his position at the first opportunity.

SHOPPERS face a jump in grocery prices of up to 7 per cent under Labor’s scheme to reduce carbon emissions, prompting calls for the Rudd government to come up with a compensation package to help low- and middle-income families.

Add this to at least a 5pc hike in power and fuel bills and Australian households will find themselves out of pocket by thousands from next year.
And what for?
A load of political bulldust so that western governments can raise the taxes they need for baby boomers’ retirement, especially those on the public teat.
And where are they to get the compensation funds? From taxes on companies, driving them and their jobs offshore?
You could tolerate it if the government was anywhere near convincing in its manmade global warming alarmism. But Senator Wong couldn’t provide a plausible answer for Senator Fielding’s reasonable query that if carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming, how come that in the past decade emissions had increased significantly yet the globe had not warmed at all.

Regular punters know there’s a new way every day to separate you from your readies. And boy, didn’t I discover a beaut over the weekend.
Brother-in-law and I dropped into Mickey Bourke’s pub-TAB at Koroit, to have a wager on the seventh at Caulfield.
A bloke was at the electronic betting machine, so the b-i-l and I chatted over a beer while he went through the motions of putting on his bets.
When he walked out, I moved over and shoved $20 into the machine.
The betting box didn’t acknowledge my note as it normally does and I noticed the screen showed a different than normal display with instructions for someone who was using their TAB account.
The penny (or considerably more) dropped; the guy before me had left his account open and my money went straight into it. I raced out the pub door, but of course he was gone.
Staff called up the record of transactions and as suspected, my $20 had gone into a TAB account. And although the thieving beggar appeared to have spent five minutes putting on bets, the record showed his only action was to open his account.
Every punter knows that in circumstances like that you have no option than to dig for extra scratch and have your intended bet. You’ll be doubly cheesed if gets up and you’re not on it.
Alas, it didn’t run a drum and I was $40 out of pocket. But wiser for the experience.

Independent sub-contractors who ignored their better judgment and voted for Rudd are discovering the price of stupidity: Stifling regulation and bullying political correctness. Not to mention political blackmail.

. . . thousands of other small building companies are discovering it won’t be easy for the “little guys” — small bands of tradies, chippies and sparkies — to get a slice of Kevin Rudd’s $14.7 billion Building the Education Revolution pie.
The BER was supposed to create local jobs for local people but, in order to work on a BER project, small builders have to commit to a bewildering set of standards and policies.
These include “social inclusion” policies, which mean they have to hire a certain number of women, disabled people, former prisoners, and indigenous apprentices. They also need to commit to an environmental policy, ensuring that whatever work they do won’t damage native grasses, or lead to the extinction of rare birds

Onward marches socialism, trampling the old enemy: individualism and risk-taking. No wonder the Australian left is so accepting of islamic extremists — they’re cast from the same conformist, intolerant mould.

A tidal wave of anguish has flooded Herald Sun’s online server on news of Sam the koala’s death.
Sam, the furry — and blistered — face of February’s shocking Victorian bushfires won hearts worldwide when a firefighter’s photo of her taking a healing drink swept the internet.

The cute koala died from the effects of chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease that ravages around half the koala population.
Sad, but you have to wonder about community values when hundreds of tributes, studded with RIPs and references to tears and prayers, jam the comments box within hours.
Reassurance of prevailing sanity came with this online observation (unpublished): So Sam dies of a sexually transmitted disease — definitely proof this marsupial eats roots and leaves.

Smart employers reward workers who show initiative, give service above and beyond to the client base and find productive uses for waste products.
Such awareness appears to have escaped the attention of City of Mediocre Geelong mandarins.
The town’s in uproar about two council workers getting sacked for using hot mix bound for the rubbish tip to fill potholes in a community club car park — in their own time.
But shock, horror . . . there was graft involved. The pair accepted free steak sandwiches from the club’s grateful manager.
So, this incident required the harshest punishment you could deliver to a semi-skilled worker — the boot.
But there was no talk of similar draconian action when this matter arose:

Geelong Trades Hall secretary Tim Gooden, who attended this week’s council meeting in protest against the action taken against the workers, asked the council about the mystery surrounding the resignation, re-appointment and second resignation of the city’s former city services general manager Peter Reeve.
The Geelong Advertiser reported in March that it was believed Mr Reeve was aged 54 years and 11 months when he resigned from the city council on December 19 to take advantage of a superannuation loophole. His job was advertised and Mr Reeve was reappointed to the role on February 23, but left again on April 19.

And while residents seethed over the City’s double standards, this matter was being played out before the bench.

Cr (David) Saunderson and Cr Cameron Granger were charged last month with failing to disclose a conflict of interest and failing to leave council chambers during a vote.